It would be an interesting dynamic if merchants (ie. BitPay) where to implement LN before most major exchanges. Meaning, people would have a higher incentive to use BTC as a means of payment instead of trying to dump it on the next exchange whenever the chance arises.

Also, whatever exchange is first to offer LN will likely have an edge in terms of liquidity, as people would be more likely to deposit with them.

Either way, very valid concerns. I hope LN is easier to integrate than SegWit, albeit I fear that this won't be the case.

...as mentioned by the other posts, BTC actually is used for trading, but I guess you are talking about BTC as a large scale payment network.



Fees were low and accepting instant 0-conf transactions for small amounts was viable until just about a year ago.

Transactions will be instant and cheap again, once Lightning Network is deployed.



Everyone who disagreed with the approach the core development team was taking simply forked off. Those that stuck to core are pretty much on the same page right now. It was a slow, painful process with a lot of drama, but in the end everyone got what they wanted.



You can use Bitcoin as whatever you want. You can choose alts over Bitcoin, if that makes more sense to you. That's the beauty of a free market of currencies.

Amen to that. Reading through some of the recent posts one would assume that we are already in the midst of a new crypto winter.

As if Bitcoin is dying just because it stopped growing for a few days. As if Bitcoin has failed just because it's running at capacity right now.

Anyone who believes that Bitcoin's main value proposition lies in ever-rising prices deserves to get shaken off by the market.

That way whenever one of their predictions come true they can point to the respective thread as having known it all along :p

(and probably to spam their youtube links)

1) Don't store your coins on Coinbase, withdraw them to a wallet of your own. Mobile, desktop... doesn't really matter. Anything would be better than Coinbase. Best case use a hardware wallet. If you're talking BTC I'd recommend Electrum as desktop wallet or Trezor / Ledger Nano S as hardware wallet.

2) Don't sell your coins on Coinbase exclusively, there's a lot of other exchanges to choose from. Just make sure to complete the verification process ahead of time, as this can take multiple days. Check which withdrawal limits apply to you ahead of time, to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Cost of living for the next couple decades so I am free to work as much or as little as I want, on whatever project interests me, without bothering about contract work to pay the rent.

Dat ticket to Mars tho

Hardware wallets store your private keys on a section of a flash memory card that can not be accessed by your PC.

When connecting a hardware wallet to your PC, all your PC does is communicate with the firmware of the hardware wallet, without even being aware of the data behind it. Whenever you send a transaction using a hardware wallet, all it does is return the signed transaction when requested, without the private key ever touching your operating system.

So basically a hardware wallet is like a tiny, airgapped, highly secured PC.

That's good to hear. While I want LN to be deployed yesterday, a rushed release is the last thing we need, even if it means that BTC loses some of its market cap along the way.

Everyone who fears alts overtaking BTC due to a belated LN release is missing the big picture. Everyone who expects alts overtaking BTC due to LN failing, does so regardless of a release date.



LN is worked on by 3 different dev teams, none of which is core (albeit individual devs intersect, obviously)

A dangerous period indeed, but I'm not sure about FOMO being over. BTC turned a lot of heads when it broke USD 10,000,-, many of which likely didn't take positions yet due to the madness of the last few weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the money that missed the (close to) USD 20,000,- train is watching from the sidelines right now, waiting for the right time to enter the market.

Oh boy, this is indeed happening. Nice graph btw. Now if only one could safely access these forks without exposing their private keys, that'd be grrreat. However I hardly expect hardware wallet providers to implement every shitfork there is.

Still waiting for people hardforking the hardforks, that should make for an interesting dynamic if pulled off well.

It has nothing to do with the miner that never collected the reward, it's just a miner that has mined an empty block. Even if the mempool is full a block may contain no transactions and still be valid. It happens from time to time, unfortunately. The single transaction within the block is simply the block reward as you very well observed.

Localbitcoins has stopped their services in Germany, be aware of that. Paxful, I don't know about. If you want to live off crypto while in Germany, you'll likely have to rely on exchanges such as Kraken, Bitcoin.de or Bitstamp. There shouldn't be any legal problems (disclaimer: not a lawyer) but be aware that while you reside in Germany, any incoming bank transaction from outside Germany of EUR 12,500,- or more needs to be reported to your local authorities and bank beforehand (AWV Meldepflicht). Otherwise you might head into trouble.

Bittrex and cryptopia.co.nz have the widest range of cryptos from what I've seen. If you are looking to trade ERC20 tokens you'll likely have to use etherdelta, as only few of them are listed on centralized exchanges.

If you're looking for specific coins to trade, why not check on coinmarketcap which market covers the most alts that you are interested in?

Good. The sooner people get their bearish tendencies out of their system, the sooner we'll reach the bottom. I personally believe it's still too early to call the bear market in though.

I think there's a slight chance that Bitcoin will touch USD 5,000,- again but I wouldn't bet on it. So far I'm not even sure we'll see sub USD 10,000,- any time soon, despite the current bearish tendencies.



People praising the blockchain, while utterly dismissing cryptocurrencies, always make me wonder if they actually feel qualified to talk about the matter, or just trying to fake it well knowing that they are using empty hulls of words.



Interesting assumption, but I doubt that much of the fresh money that went into Bitcoin came from gold (yet). Thus I doubt that a Bitcoin crash will see people move from crypto to gold.



Oh so that's what the recent declines are about! There I was thinking the market simply got ahead of itself

Fair enough.

If you don't mind me asking: Do you (a) harden your brainwallet using a script, similar to OP, or do you (b) rely on a technique that you can apply off the top of your head, without relying on a computer? (eg. a long passphrase that is not part of a known body of literature, changing / shifting letters around in a way that can be easily remembered...)

Both make sense when trying to avoid storing data outside your head, but (a) seems more secure while (b) gives you full flexibility regardless of whether you have access to your hardening script.

1) DNS is not secure, 2) easily blocked and 3) not used to transact millions of dollars worth of currency.



Coordinators require trust, which is something cryptocurrencies are striving to get rid of.



Separating the currency from the network leads to counterparty risk.



PoW has nothing to do with spam transactions. "PoW is stupid" is not a counter-argument. All meaningful BTC hardforks are relying on PoW so far.



Everyone can set up nodes using IP addresses instead of domain names. The application of DNS is irrelevant to this discussion.



No such things as coordinators / hubs / gateways in the LN network topology. Alice is a LN node. Bob is a LN node. Everyone en route between Alice and Bob is a node.

Once again, no IOUs. No fake tokens. All very real, time based transactions.

I know too little about blockchain sharding to argue either for or against it, I guess I'll watch Ethereum to see how this works out. Not sure if there ever has been any discourse of applying sharding to the Bitcoin blockchain. It seems to come with its own set of problems however.



Assuming blockchain sharding relies on coordinators, we have a weak point and needless complexity right there. I do assume though that there are more effective approaches than that.

LN is neither a rewrite nor a patch btw, it's simply an additional protocol layer. Much like OMNI and XCP before it. And like HTTP on top of TCP/IP before even that.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the reply will be cached". If this still refers to LN, a channel state is maintained, but kept up to date by enforcing state updates by using presigned timelocked transactions.



If this still refers to LN, coins can still be traced back to their origin, even when using LN.



You're welcome to fork then Or contribute to one of the alts that are eying blockchain sharding right now (assuming ETH is not the only one).



Read up on sybil attacks on why this is a bad idea. Also the whole point of cryptocurrencies is to go trustless. Trying to create a trustee network comes with problems of its own. It's barely working with Root and Intermediary CAs. It becomes even less reliable with incentives to defect, such as the case with digital cash.

Even a decentralized system is only as strong as its weakest link if it has a single point of failure. See Ripple and how tokens are issued.

The consensus protocol itself is quite interesting and I'm sure that LN has borrowed some pages from it (assuming there is no prior work on which both protocols are based upon) but I still find it hard to trust a payment network that relies on a central corporate entity for both development and token issuance. I'm sure that Ripple has merits of its own but it's not quite what I expect from a cryptocurrency.



PoW is not about preventing spam transactions, it's about preventing double-spend attacks. Before PoW came along you couldn't rely on keeping a valid, reliable ledger state without a central entity acting as arbiter. Bitcoin's master stroke is making the network not only fault-tolerant against attackers, but actually using what would usually be an attack -- ie. brute force -- to protect the network from the very same class of attacks.

Like everything this approach comes with a trade-off, which in this case is secure decentralization -- on every aspect -- at the cost of performance. At least to me the electricity cost involved seems like a step upward from the waste of human resources that is banking, but that's up for debate of course. One could argue whether the problem of central entities controlling finance is actually a problem worth solving, but assuming it is, PoW is unfortunately our best bet so far. There are other PoX approaches of course, but their viability is a different discussion.



I'm not sure I quite follow you here. You don't need to rely on DNS to connect to other nodes. You can't use DNS spoofing to fake transactions. Worst case you could probably prevent specific nodes from sending or receiving transactions, but that would require a lot of targeted resources without much impact on Bitcoin as a whole.


Assuming you haven't already, you should really look into how LN works. You might be surprised that it's not quite the plaster you expect it to be.

Here's a good starting point:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/

Had you told me that Bitcoin would reach close to USD 20,000,- by the end of 2017 I wouldn't have believed you. Now, even with the recent decline in price, reaching USD 40,000,- by the end of 2018 seems to be well within reach to me. Apart from the obvious fundamental question whether we'll see a successful LN deployment in 2018, a lot will likely hinge on the next few weeks of market action. I personally am fairly confident that USD 10,000,- will hold. If it doesn't, the downward trend is likely to continue and will probably be tough to reverse.



The anti-anonymity trend has been a reality of western exchanges for years now. I doubt it will have much of a market impact, especially since most of the new investors -- based on anecdotal observations -- don't care much about the privacy aspect of cryptocurrencies at all.

By then Bitcoin will be either dead, or worth enough to pay for electricity and hardware even with minuscule transaction fees.

The worst case that could happen is that miners drop off the network until mining BTC becomes profitable again, making the BTC network consume less electricity.

Either way miners have decades to adjust themselves to these futures changes. In this regard the Bitcoin protocol is more reliable than legal, social and economical circumstances that often give traditional businesses only months or years to adjust (or die).